Although the first batch of Steam Machines is expected in November, some manufacturers have already announced their own versions and Valve has now added a full list of Steam Machines, including specifications and prices, over at its Steam site.

The cheapest one is the iBuyPower SBX, which starts at US $459.99 and some Steam Machines are priced at US $4,999, like Falcon Northwest Tiki Steam Machine which goes from US $1,999.99 to US $4,999.99, or Origin's Omega Steam Machine starting at US $899.99 and going up to US $4,999.99.

There will obviously plenty of Steam Machines to choose from, including some coming from favorite retailers/e-tailers like Alternate and Scan Computers, as well as recognizable hardware manufacturers like Asus and Gigabyte.

According to Valve's Steam Machine site, each Steam Machine will be running on Steam OS and ship with a Steam Controller.

We already knew that Valve would share a few more details regarding its Steam Machines and Steam Controller at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015, and it appears that these will be available in November, alongside the new Valve streaming device, the Steam Link.

Valve is definitely serious about bringing gaming to the living room and while it will have some fierce competition from Nvidia's new Shield console, Valve's Steam Machines, at least some of them, pack quite a bit more punch and do not rely on cloud gaming for more demanding titles.

In addition to more details about Steam Machines and Steam Controller, Valve has also unveiled Steam Link, a streaming device that should connect multiple systems and be able to stream games from other devices at 1080p resolution at 60Hz and with low latency, as long as they are connected on the same network. According to the first pictures, Steam Link is a small box with HDMI, two USB ports and Ethernet port.

According to what has already been announced at GDC 2015, Valve plans to have both Steam Machines, the Steam Controller and the new Steam Link on retail/e-tail shelves by November, or just in time for the holiday shopping season.

The Steam Controller and the Steam Link will be priced at US $49.99 while Valve expects Steam Machines to start "at the same price point as game consoles," but also offer "higher performance."

While have heard a lot about Valve's Steam Machines project we still have not seen an official release, it appears that the company will once again show the latest prototypes during Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015.

According to a report from Polygon.com, Valve's Doug Lombardi confirmed that the company will showcase new Steam Machines prototypes at the upcoming Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2015 scheduled to start on March 2 in San Francisco. Valve has previously detailed a total of 13 partners which are part of the Steam Machines project, including the likes of Alienware, Zotac, CyberPowerPC, iBuyPower, Maingear.

For those who came in late, Valve's Steam Machines project is a device that will be based on a variety of hardware components, price range and run on Valve's own SteamOS operating system.

Valve has originally planned to released Steam Machines sometime last year, but company has decided to delay the release this year.

It will certainly be interesting to see the new Steam Machines prototypes and see if there are any new partners with new and interesting hardware combinations.

There have been a lot of rumours about Steam Machines and it looks like that this PC that doesn’t run Windows and that lets you play some Steam based games has been pushed back to 2015.

We have seen some prototypes including a Nvidia powered mock-up up Alienware system and we believe that these machines will have some success in the market. They are more or less a fully capable PC that won't run Windows unless you have a dual boot option with two separate drives, but the Steam OS will look good on your TV in the living room and it should be great for gaming.

Valve, the company behind Steam OS, has gone on the record saying that it will delay its machines to 2015. The exact quote was "Realistically, we're now looking at a release window of 2015, not 2014."

As long as you are not ready to hit the the back to school shopping timeframe, you have slimmer chances to make a significant impact on the market. Since Steam OS machines are tricky items to sell, Valve probably wanted to push them in order to add some additional functionality.

On the other hand the delay happens in rather awkward time as both Nvidia and AMD have functional drivers, but we guess that it’s tricky to make Windows based games stable on the Linux based Steam OS. First machines were running Nvidia hardware followed by some prototypes running Intel graphics hardware and AMD was shy to show its cards running in Steam OS machines for quite some time.

Silver lining for AMD?

On the other hand more than a dozen manufacturers have committed to manufacture Steam OS based machines including Alienware, Alternate, CyberPowerPC, Digital Storm, Falcon NW, GigaByte, iBuyPower, Maingear, Materiel.net, Next Spa, Origin PC, Scan, Webhallen and Zotac.

Oddly enough, AMD might even benefit from this delay, as it will have more time to prepare its hardware and driver for the final machine release. On the other hand there are no guaranties that Steam OS and Steam Machines will be successful, although we like the concept.

The way we see Steam OS machines is that this is nothing other than small factor PC that doesn’t run Windows. We would prefer a Windows option for added functionality, in a small form factor if necessary, but it’s hard to say goodbye to the Windows productivity option.

On the other hand since people mostly use PCs to surf the net, social not-working and content consumption, it is not necessary to have Windows on many of them. Steam OS will give users the ability to enjoy PC games without having to deal with Windows, or pay for the OS.

Whether or not this will be enough to make Steam OS machines successful remains to be seen.

It appears that those lucky 300 beta testers have been quite busy as Valve has decided to drop the touchscreen on its Steam Controller and add a couple of new physical buttons.

According to some info coming from Valve's Steam Dev Days conference, it appears that the touchscreen could divert players attention from the screen so Valve has decided to get rid of it. Valve has also added a couple of new physical buttons to the Stema Controller, or to be precise, two clusters of four buttons placed in a standard button arrangement.

According to various tweets, Valve will include "ghosting" mode which should provide an on-screen visualization of the buttons. We will probabaly hear more quite soon and with the touchscreen out of the the controller picture, the final version of the Steam Controller should be at least cheaper to both produce and sell as it hits retail/e-tail later this year.

At the sidelines of CES 2014 Valve decided to reveale the names of twelve companies that will be making Steam Machines, including some quite famous names like Alienware, Gigabyte, Alternate, Zotac, Scan Computers, and bunch of others.

Valve managed to get a lot of attention for its Steam OS and Steam Machines, which aim to bring the gaming PC back to the living room and on the big TV screen. While there are still not much details regarding the actual specifications of the Steam Machines, Valve was ready to reveal the list of partners which will be behind the Steam Machines.

The list features some rather famous names and includes Alienware, Falcon Northwest, CyberPowerPC, Origin PC, GIGABYTE, Materiel.net, Webhallen, Alternate, Next, Zotac, Scan Computers and, of course, iBuyPower which was earlier pictured.

Most if not all Steam Machines will most likely be on display at CES 2014 as soon as it opens its doors tomorrow, on January 7th.

Steam OS went live shortly before the weekend and in case you are not one of the 300 lucky users to receive beta hardware, there is now a way for you to start using it. It will require that you build your own Steam machine.

There are currently two versions of SteamOS available and Valve recommend that you use a default installation method which is a pre-configured image-based install using CloneZilla. You will need an Intel or AMD 64-bit capable processor, 4GB or more RAM, 400GB or larger hard drive and an Nvidia graphics card. Support for AMD and Intel graphics is coming soon but it is not available right now. Valve lists UEFI boot support and USB port for installation as additional features.

The other method uses Debian Installer, which allows for customization after an automated install step. Some Linux knowledge is highly desirable for the second option. The default installation file is a 2.4GB ZIP file that needs to be installed from a 4GB of larger USB stick formatted in Fat 32 name named SYSRESTORE. You will have to unzip the SYSRESTORE.zip file to the stick and boot from it.

Once you boot you will be asked to select Restore Entire Disk, but the disadvantage of this method is that it needs a 1TB disk for itself. Both installation methods will erase all content on the target computer which means you need a free 1TB hard drive to give it a try.

Even if you install, we believe it won't be the same to play games via a keyboard and mouse and at this time there is no way to simply buy a Steam OS controller. We might give it a try later this week, we just need to wipe the content of one of the drives that sit in one of the old drives in the drawer.

You can get some more detailed step by step guidance at the official website here.

Steam Machines are one of the more interesting PC concepts to emerge this year, but many users are moaning about the pricing, which in case of high-end models easily ended up in four digit territory.

However, iBuyPower reckons it can do more with less. Their Steam Machine is powered by an unspecified AMD multi-core APU and R9 270X graphics. It will be available in two flavours, clear or white, with or without the LED decor at its waistline.

Prices start at $499 and that sounds more than fair, as it is squarely within console territory, at least if you buy the cheapest SKU. Of course, since we don’t know the exact spec we can’t be sure whether it is really a great deal.

Interestingly, iBuyPower is promising 1080p gaming at 60fps in all Steam games. That doesn’t tell us a lot about the spec of performance though, but getting 1080p gaming on PC hardware for $499 sounds intriguing.

Here’s a bit of news to warm the hearts of Radeon fans everywhere. AMD GPUs will be included in next year’s batch of Steam Machines. We can’t say we weren’t expecting this, but Valve’s original announcement did not mention AMD at all – it was all Nvidia.

The announcement caused plenty of controversy, as many speculated that Valve is basically focusing on Nvidia hardware and that its SteamOS gear won’t feature any AMD hardware. This is clearly not the case and Valve is moving in to squash the rumourmongers.

Valve’s Doug Lombardi told Forbes that the first wave of Steam Machine prototypes includes a variety of Nvidia cards, but he stressed that it is not “an indication that Steam Machines are Nvidia-only.”

“In 2014, there will be Steam Machines commercially available with graphics hardware made by AMD, Nvidia, and Intel. Valve has worked closely together with all three of these companies on optimizing their hardware for SteamOS, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future,” he said.

So much for conspiracy theories peddled by the usual suspects.

But why didn’t AMD or Valve respond a bit earlier? Forbes speculates that the entire mess could have actually benefited AMD, which is set to hold a quarterly earnings call on October 17. On top of that there is the Origin controversy.

We are not in the conspiracy theory business, there’s clearly plenty of stuff going on behind the scenes but there’s no reason to jump to conclusions.

Following its pre-announced series of announcements, Valve has revealed its line of living room hardware that will be more than happy to run on its previously announced Linux-based SteamOS. Although everyone expected the Steam Box, Valve has announced that we will actually see "several boxes to choose from, with an array of specifications, price and performance".

Scheduled to show up sometime next year, Valve did not shed any light on actual hardware, partners or even the expected high-performance prototype that they currently have, but rather noted that around 300 users will be chosen for a hardware beta test. A small number of users (30 or so) will be chosen directly on behalf of their past community contributions and beta participation while rest will be chosen randomly.

Those lucky enough to score the prototype for beta testing will be encouraged to share their impressions online but we are more interested in partners as well as hardware of Steam Machines.

Valve also launched the closed beta of its Family Sharing service, same one that allows users to share content across multiple devices.